After Years It's Only the Beginning

With the crazy weather we might find the farm nice and green when we arrive

For the past three months we’ve been living in a 90 square foot room in a three bedroom apartment shared by two friends of ours. It’s a little weird living in a shared 3 bedroom apartment when you’re married and you’ve spent the prior two years living by yourselves. Bills, dishes, trash, cleaning, finding time to be alone, it all gets complicated. Needless to say, while it’s been fun, I’m really looking forward to having my own space again and this time having a lot more space than I’ve ever had before.

Next Saturday our lives will change dramatically. We’ll go from never having owned a house to owning a house. From never having owned land to owning 84 acres. From never farming before to farming. I’ll be working remotely, so at least some of my daily life will remain somewhat intact, but Sweetbreads’ life will shift entirely. The list of things to accomplish when you’re starting out homesteading and farming is endless. Fencing will go up, buildings will be built, the garden will be planted, animals will come on. Pretty soon many lives will depend on us for protection, food and water. Every - single - day. We’ll not only have their lives to sustain and enjoy, but also their deaths to endure.

Preparation for various scenarios becomes a serious concern. It’s not a matter of “what if there’s no G train, would I bike it or just get a cab?” Or, “who do I call if the hot water heater stops working?” It’s more like, “what if a wolf eats our best does?” Or, “what if all our chickens die for some unknown reason?” Or, “what if any number of things goes wrong and we can’t get the dairy/cheesemaking operation off the ground?”

It’s a lot of responsibility coming on all at once. Neither of us have really been in that position before, so I suppose it's probably best to know no other way. It’s going to take a lot of learning and adapting and it will be a lot of fun, but it’ll also be pretty damn hard.

We’ve been planning this for years and yet in less than weeks it will only be the beginning. At the end of the month we'll pack up the truck and start the drive down to Tennessee. Home.